Recent advances in information systems and the digitization of larger amounts of information have led to unprecedented access to sources of information. Although the capability to access an almost unlimited pool of information exists for any person at a computer connected to the Internet, the ability to access that volume of information remains at best limited.
It is understood that more efficient methods are required for permitting human users to interact with these sources of information. Even when the information source is limited to an individual body of knowledge, i.e., a corpus of information, the size of a conventional knowledge base typically presents problems to the ordinary user. Even with specialized corpora the volume of information that a user can access has expanded exponentially. This volume of information typically overwhelms the average user. Given a corpus, a body of information, of a particular format, the conventional user may have significant difficulty in determining what information within the corpus to review and how to proceed to narrow the information accessed within the corpus according to the user's information retrieval need.
Some approaches have sought to facilitate the user experience by providing the user with navigation options based on pregenerated topics. When a knowledge base is created, various topics can be applied to the information contained within the corpus to provide topical navigation options. These topics can be considered enrichments of the underlying data, as they provide easier ways to understand and access the breadth of the knowledge base. These data enrichments provide description of the underlying data and can be used to facilitate navigation or searching. Other approaches have solicited user feedback to improve organization of information. And yet other approaches extract terms from results generated during a user search through a corpus.